The website is diffusing to death

The harsh reality is that only a tiny fraction of your social media followers will click on a link to an outside website, and most prefer to interact and consume content that’s native to the platform they’re browsing. So if you’re only publishing, at most, a few articles per week and don’t have an enormous social following, chances are your content is getting lost in the noise.

This is a new reality we’re living in that’s going to make it ever harder to build destination sites. What’s becoming important is finding ways to expose your ideas to a wider audience, and that now means, inevitably, working with other platforms to spread your writing and content.

I suspect that people working in video are well ahead of those of us who are more text-centric here. Do you know anyone working in video who isn’t uploading to Vimeo, YouTube or Vine?

Porous websites

We’ve talked for a long time about sites having “fuzzy” boundaries – that content diffuses beyond the “wall” of the website – but now we’re seeing that spreading further. I’m fascinated by the way Euan Semple cross-posts everything he writes to Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and his own blog. He’s clearly more interested in sharing his ideas than building website per se.

And that’s a difficult idea for those of us from a publication background to adjust to.